Tribal gambling revenue up big; card rooms, pull tabs down

Faced with the prospect of further deep cuts to schools and health care, there’s an increasing debate about whether Washington should roll the dice and allow more gambling in places like bars and other areas to bring in more tax revenue.

Dave Meinert writing on PubliCola got things started last week, David Goldstein slapped the idea down and now Peter Callaghan at The News Tribune weighs in. And Hugo Kugiya at Crosscut examines the political chances of such a move.

Figures from the Washington State Gambling Commission reviewed by seattlepi.com show that gambling revenue is actually going down or staying relatively stable in all areas except the one place Olympia’s tax men can’t go – tribal casinos, which have experienced a huge growth.

In the 2005 fiscal year, total net receipts (amount wagered minus amount paid out in prizes) from the state’s tribal casinos, bingo parlors, card rooms, lottery sales, horse racing and pull tabs and punchboards was $1.695 billion. In 2010, it was $2.292 billion. In 2005 tribal casinos made up 61 percent of all gambling net receipts; last year the figure was 77 percent.

Revenue actually decreased from ’05 to ’10 for Bingo ($25.1 million to $10.7 million ), Punchboards and Pulltabs ($126.2 million to $72.8 million) and Card Rooms ($302.6 million to $228.6 million). Money from horse racing went down, too, from $35.5 million million to $30.6 million. Lottery revenue went up from $177.2 million in 2005 to $199.2 million last year.

But the state’s 28 tribal casinos saw their net receipts jump from $1.02 billion to $1.74 billion – a 70 percent jump. The tribes are autonomous governments who negotiate agreements with the state. Those agreements do not include revenue sharing.

In 2005 the state Gambling Commission and the Spokane Tribe reached an agreement that would have allowed more than 7,000 video gambling machines and a six-tiered revenue sharing structure. Depending on the number of tribes participating, the state could have received from $40 million to more than $140 million annually in revenue sharing, according to estimates.

But Gov. Chris Gregoire renegotiated the deal to slow the expansion of tribal gambling. Her spokesman at the time said she did so after after listening to concerns from a wide range of groups, including other tribes. The renegotiated deal without revenue sharing allowed only 4,700 machines. If the original compact had been approved, other tribes would be entitled to similar levels of expansion under the same terms.

The new deal allowed the total number of gambling terminals to go from 18,225 to 27,300 and increased wagering limits from $5 to $20 on 15 percent of the machines.